The Northern Lights, Brought to Your City

A gorgeous art installation.

One artist has harnessed the Northern Lights so they can be brought anywhere, anytime.

Well, sort of. Swiss artist Dan Acher’s art installation Borealis recreates the aurora borealis using high-powered laser beams, which interact with particle clouds to create the effect. In this video, we see the piece in action at its premiere at the Rolex Learning Centre at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, to commemorate the opening of the new ArtLab building. The touring installation is affected by changing weather conditions, so it looks a bit different in every location. Borealis is about “our ancestral communion with nature and about our recent compulsion to control it.”